Poetry of the First World War

The poetry of the First World War may not have been explicitly modernist in form and technique, as most of century, but its striking subject matter and the sheer force of its disillusionment meant that it was able to speak to modern ears much more direct/y, with a cry of anguish that has few parallels, before or since. The main poets of the age were Rupert Brooke, who maintained his rather old-fashioned outlook on war and patriotism, as exemplified in the celebrated lines from the sonnet The Soldier. "If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field /That is for ever England."

Some war poets, in particular Siegfried Sassoon, survived the war and continued their career afterwards, although obviously deeply scarred by their experience. Others who died in action, such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, were quickly disillusioned by life in the j trenches and highlighted the squalor and brutality of it all I in works ranging from colloquial portraits of their fellow soldiers to dream visions of mysterious significance. The case of Wilfred Owen, who was killed on Armistice Day 1918, is one of the most moving. Already a poet at an early age, much influenced by Keats and the fin-de-siecle decadents, he was called up in 1915. In his brief but brilliant career, he achieved remarkable force and delicacy of feeling in poems such as Futility, Strange Meeting and Dulce et Decorum est, given below. I taong the papers found on his death was a sketch for a preface to a book of poems in which he wrote:

“ This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.

Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion or power, except War.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense

consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do

today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be

truthful.”

Drama (1900-1939)

As far as drama is concerned the early twentieth century is dominated by Shaw's comedy of ideas, though there were several other trends which did not enjoy outstanding public success. One of these was represented in Ireland by the plays of W. B. Yeats (in verse) and J. M. Synge (The Playboy of the Western H, 1906) which were specifically designed as the renaissance' of an Irish theatre movement and met with a mixture of hostility, bewilderment and approval on their performances at Yeats' Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

There were also numerous verse plays composed by English poets (such as Auden and Eliot), but apart torn Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, which was written lo commemorate the martyrdom of Thomas Becket commissioned to be performed in Canterbury Cathedral, they had little success.

George Bernard Shaw

(1856-1950)